Bad Link Removal and Penguin Recovery Services

The bad link removal services provided by McDougall interactive will analyze your current situation with regard to SEO penalties and correct the problem, so you can get back on track with powerful search rankings. A common question we get asked lately is how to recover from a Google Penguin penalty. First you have to assess if you have been either algorithmically filtered or if you have an actual manual penalty.

Algorithmically filtered means you’re not getting good results in Google anymore because Google doesn’t like the low-quality links pointing at you and are “punishing you” for it in a behind-the-scenes/programmatic kind of way. When you are manually penalized, they’re telling you directly in a notification to stop doing what you’re doing. Both are bad, and sometimes can take months or longer to recover from. In fact, we’ve seen clients who had been blogging three times a day, who were not seeing any additional gains in their traffic because of the lead weight of the Panda or Penguin penalty holding them down. Therefore, it’s absolutely critical that you take immediate action or no amount of content marketing will solve your SEO problems. It’s very common for customers to come to us who had no idea that their SEO company or a competitor was sending bad back links to them, so if that’s your situation, you’re not alone, but you still need to correct the problem.

Our Penguin recovery service is currently priced at $5,000. We will do all of the steps listed in the section below on how to recover from a Google Penguin penalty and more. If you’ve been manually panelized, we’ll try a minimum of three times to plead your case to Google with a high-quality letter to them and work with you to take the steps necessary to correct what’s causing the problem. Our most recent manual penalty case was removed after just one honest letter to Google that included all of the work we did to correct the problem. If you sign up for our monthly SEO package at $5,000 a month or more, our Penguin recovery service is included.

Please contact us at 978-750-8000 and ask for John McDougall if you would like to discuss your situation.

Penguin recovery assessment (the first step)

One of the first things we do is to look specifically at organic search traffic using Google Analytics. If we don’t have access to Google Analytics, we use SEM Rush to get a quick fix on whether or not there are dramatic drops in traffic aligned with the dates Google Penguin was released. Check out this page on Moz if you want to know what the specific Penguin release dates are.

Steep decline in traffic aligned with a fall Penguin release date!

Google manual penalty

If you think you may have a manual penalty, then you need to log in to Google Webmaster tools and look for a notification of a penalty.

If Google has told you that they’re manually penalizing you, then we will need to not only use the Google disavow tool to tell them what links we’ve tried to get removed and don’t want to be associated with, but we will have to submit a reconsideration request, where we make our case of why we should be freed of the penalty.

The disavow – back link removal tool from Google’s page

There are many steps to the link removal/penalty repair process, and we recently paid one of our favorite mentors $1,000 an hour for several hours, to make sure that we were doing this 100% right. We’ve been doing search engine optimization since 1995, but we are never afraid to bring in other experts to help us refine our skills.

How to recover from Google Penguin: An Overview

Assess the situation using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools.

Look at your back links using Open Site Explorer, AHREFS, and Majestic for low-quality websites pointing at you. Use various tools to figure out which links are good or bad because you can’t always tell just by looking at the websites.

Send emails to all of the low-quality websites that are linking to you. Try three times and document your efforts just in case you get manually penalized and need to plead your case to Google. It’s also better to get links removed than to just disavow them. Most of the time, however, you don’t get responses from low-quality websites and/or pathetically they ask you for money to have them removed – which we don’t recommend you pay.

Upload a disavow document to Google with the links you don’t want to be associated with.

Ping the pages that link to you to speed up the process (pinging notifies Google to re-crawl the offending pages that they would not crawl often otherwise). If you skip this step, it will take a lot longer – months longer or more.

Get new high-quality back links or you will never get back to even where you were before Penguin started hurting your traffic. Removing the bad links will never solve all of your problems. It simply removes things that are blocking you from succeeding. Now that those links that used to help you are no longer helping or hurting, you may only get back to 50% or so of your previous standings depending on how bad your situation was. Included in our monthly SEO retainers is a high-quality link building service, based on high-quality content.

Add regular fresh content that gets shared socially, which will help continue showing Google that you’re a trusted site.

Look regularly at your analytics to see if your traffic is coming back, but instead of watching water boil, do everything in your power to create content that people will link to. Looking at the top pages that get linked to from your competitors is a great place to start when thinking about link bait. Real public relations (not free press release submission sites, which can actually cause penalties) is another great way to get high-quality links.

A few Google Penguin resources

This article discusses how it’s not a bad idea according to Google to go ahead and use the Google disavow tool, even if you’re not sure you have a Penguin penalty (bad links are bad links and they will catch up with you eventually). This article discusses Google disavow tool basics.

This video from Google’s Matt Cutts explains whether or not you should use the disavow tool, even if you don’t have a manual action:

The Google Penguin recovery process takes place over a four-to-eight-week period, and includes a detailed report on the steps that we took and the recommended link building strategies moving forward.

For details on this back link removal service and Penguin repair, please call us at 978-750-8000 now!